Birth and death notification via mobile devices: a mixed methods systematic review

Abstract

Background Ministries of health, donors, and other decision‐makers are exploring how they can use mobile technologies to acquire accurate and timely statistics on births and deaths. These stakeholders have called for evidence‐based guidance on this topic. This review was carried out to support World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations on digital interventions for health system strengthening. Objectives Primary objective: To assess the effects of birth notification and death notification via a mobile device, compared to standard practice. Secondary objectives: To describe the range of strategies used to implement birth and death notification via mobile devices and identify factors influencing the implementation of birth and death notification via mobile devices. Search methods We searched CENTRAL, MEDLINE, Embase, the Global Health Library, and POPLINE (August 2, 2019). We searched two trial registries (August 2, 2019). We also searched Epistemonikos for related systematic reviews and potentially eligible primary studies (August 27, 2019). We conducted a grey literature search using mHealthevidence.org (August 15, 2017) and issued a call for papers through popular digital health communities of practice. Finally, we conducted citation searches of included studies in Web of Science and Google Scholar (May 15, 2020). We searched for studies published after 2000 in any language. Selection criteria For the primary objective, we included individual and cluster‐randomised trials; cross‐over and stepped‐wedge study designs; controlled before‐after studies, provided they have at least two intervention sites and two control sites; and interrupted time series studies. For the secondary objectives , we included any study design, either quantitative, qualitative, or descriptive, that aimed to describe current strategies for birth and death notification via mobile devices; or to explore factors that influence the implementation of these strategies, including studies of acceptability or feasibility. For the primary objective , we included studies that compared birth and death notification via mobile devices with standard practice. For the secondary objectives, we included studies of birth and death notification via mobile device as long as we could extract data relevant to our secondary objectives. We included studies of all cadres of healthcare providers, including lay health workers; administrative, managerial, and supervisory staff; focal individuals at the village or community level; children whose births were being notified and their parents/caregivers; and individuals whose deaths were being notified and their relatives/caregivers. Data collection and analysis For the primary obj...

Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) Qualitative Evidence Syntheses, Differences From Reviews of Intervention Effectiveness and Implications for Guidance

“…These sections have been shown to be important sources of information when developing implementation considerations for WHO guideline recommendations, and we have recently described the use of qualitative evidence syntheses for this purpose in more detail (Glenton et al, 2019). In addition, authors of intervention effectiveness reviews linked to the topic of the qualitative evidence synthesis could also use this information in their own Implications for practice section, and this is already being done in our mixed methods reviews, which include both effectiveness and qualitative studies (Agarwal et al, 2020; Vasudevan et al, 2021). Further exploration is needed of how different stakeholders in different contexts use these prompts, including the extent to which they are able to bring them together with local experience and evidence to inform decisions, and whether applicability checklists may be useful in this process (Booth et al, 2019; Lewin et al, 2009).…”

The reliability and integrity of overall survival data based on follow-up records only and potential solutions to the challenges

“…The time of death acquired from death certificates and death records is generally considered to be highly reliable and to have no conflict of interest, but it is highly dependent on the cooperation of the participant's family members at the request of the investigators and the likelihood that the patient will die in a particular hospital, respectively. 19 , 20 Identifying time of death during regular clinical follow-up, which is still highly dependent on the compliance of participants' families, is the most common method, though the detailed proportion of death sources may vary among countries.…”

Assessing unConventional Evidence (ACE) tool: development and content of a tool to assess the strengths and limitations of ‘unconventional’ source materials

“…Secondly, we piloted the tool in three evidence syntheses that included unconventional sources of evidence [31][32][33]. One of the authors (SL) was a co-author on these reviews but did not lead the application of the tool.…”

“…There are growing efforts to include unconventional source materials in evidence syntheses, including reviews addressing questions such as the acceptability and feasibility of interventions and programmes, their equity and human rights impacts, and factors affecting their implementation. The syntheses conducted for a recent WHO guideline on digital interventions for health systems strengthening provide one example of this [32,33,35]. These syntheses drew on information from programme development and implementation descriptions, feasibility and usability evaluations, programmatic observations and news articles to describe the range of strategies used to implement interventions considered in the guideline and to identify factors affecting implementation.…”